>>2256100Tracing can be extremely helpful. It has long been an established dogma that tracing is always bad, evil and counter productive.
Proko uses tracing in his anatomy class. It's a very good tool for anatomy studies - things like tracing muscles or loomis heads and other types of construction over photos. The main benefit is that you get more studies done in a shorter period of time when you don't have to worry about proportion as much. I've also found it helpful to include tracing when doing master studies. It can really help when you're having trouble nailing certain shapes, foreshortened limbs and stuff like that. The way I do it is that I do both tracings and copies by eyeballing the same subject. Good way to quickly expand your visual library.
I first found out that tracing could improve your drawing when I spent a few hours tracing sneakers in illustrator for a boring vector illustration. The next day I could draw better shoes from imagination than I've ever done before. I remember reading an interview with some old school fantasy artist (forgot who) and he stated that tracing was way underrated and he had learnt alot of anatomy stuff with it. Try it out for yourself. Experiment.
